Rethinking Fairness: The Scope of Assignor Estoppel Doctrine After Minerva

Assignor estoppel, a common-law doc- trine, may prevent the former employee, as the patent assignor, from asserting the patent invalidity defense. The doctrine prevents unfair practices where, after assigning all the patent rights, the assignor claims the invalidity of the assigned patent such that she may exploit the invention without infringement. This article discerns the breadth of assignor estoppel doctrine and its implications after a recent Supreme Court case Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 2298 (2021).

Legal protection systems, corporate governance and firm performance: a cross-country comparison

Purpose This paper builds on the “Law and Finance” theory and aims to examine the effect of the legal and institutional environment on the governance–performance relationship in the context of non-US firms. More precisely, it examines whether and how the country’s legal system and the level of investor protection interact with the firm-level corporate governance and affect firm performance. Design/methodology/approach The authors used the “G-Index” governance score developed by the Governance Metrics International rating for a sample of 12,728 firm-year observations from 23 countries over the 2009–2016 period. Findings The results show that the interaction between the country-level institutions and corporate governance system significantly affect the firm performance. In particular, the findings indicate that firms operating in common law countries tend to exhibit a positive valuation effect and higher performance than firms with a comparable corporate governance level operating in civil law countries. More precisely, the authors find that in common law countries, higher investor protection with enhanced corporate governance is associated with better firm performance. However, firms operating in civil law countries with weaker investor protection and a comparable corporate governance level tend to experience a negative valuation effect. Originality/value The findings suggest that the institutional and legal environment is crucial and important in determining the value-maximizing level of good governance practices. Managers and regulators should carefully analyze the cost of these initiatives and should coordinate it with the needs of the country’s legal system. The challenge for the company will be how to adjust its corporate governance strategy according to the needs and demands of the country’s legal system in which the company operates to improve its performance. The regulators should ensure a fit between the specifics of the national legal and institutional environment and corporate governance standards and practices.

Moving Along the Continuum of Loyalty From a Standard Towards Rules

This article focuses on the location of the duty of loyalty—a unique legal norm in Common Law jurisdictions—both actual and desirable, on the continuum between rules and standards. A rule is a relatively ‘closed’ technical norm, at a high level of specificity; it requires little judicial discretion. A standard is an ‘open’ norm, with a greater degree of flexibility, that requires the exercise of discretion. The insights from this jurisprudential perspective are used to reveal the preferred way for further developing the duty of loyalty. The article explains that ‘loyalty,’ intuitively classified as a ‘pure’ standard, has been reconstructed over time as more specific rules. Moreover, it suggests that, ideally, this movement should continue; namely, when applying loyalty to a specific case, courts should include informative content that would promote predictability. It then illustrates that, unfortunately, this road is not always taken by the courts. A decision to retain loyalty as an ad hoc standard, or an inverse attempt to delineate the boundaries of this norm, has implications on the certainty, consistency, and ethical content of the law. Considering that this duty spreads across different legal fields, personal and commercial, the significance of this discussion becomes all the more evident.

Paying the price? Academic work and parenting during COVID-19

Introduction: The shift to remote working/learning to slow transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has had widespread mental health impacts. We aimed to describe how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the mental health of students and faculty within a health sciences faculty at a central Canadian university. Methods: Via an online survey, we queried mental health in the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic quantitatively (scale: 1 (most negative)-100 (most positive)) and qualitatively. Results: The sample (n = 110) was predominantly women (faculty 39/59; [66.1%]; students 46/50; [92.0%]). Most faculty were married/common law (50/60; [84.8%]) and had children at home (36/60; [60.0%]); the opposite was true for most students. Faculty and students self-reported comparable mental health (40.47±24.26 and 37.62±26.13; respectively). Amongst women, those with vs. without children at home, reported significantly worse mental health impacts (31.78±23.68 vs. 44.29±27.98; respectively, p = 0.032). Qualitative themes included: “Sharing resources,” “spending money,” “few changes,” for those without children at home; “working at home can be isolating,” including the subtheme, “balancing act”: “working in isolation,” “working more,” for those with children at home. Discussion: Amongst women in academia, including both students and faculty, those with children at home have disproportionately worse mental health than those without children at home.

The Sharecropper’s Story and An Ethics for Environmentalism

The progress and now the danger of American Prosperity has relied on the treatment of the Earth as “land.” The story of “lands” around the Atlantic include people viewing the Earth as “Mother,” as “sacred,” and a gift, and as a thing. While the English Common Law treated land as property, the Latin/Roman view saw land as having a “social function.” This view seems implicit in the decision of freed Blacks after the Civil War to choose sharecropping over wages. They believed that “the tillers of the soil should be guaranteed possession of the land” (from the Creed of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union). Returning to the sharecroppers’ desire opens the possibility of changing the current course of history by taking reciprocity or “balanced social relations” as our guiding star. Balancing social relations would entail reparations of unbalanced relations and sharing a city’s land wealth with all the city’s inhabitants.